are fooling around, no hats, they’re changing the prayers, they’re changing the music, the rules. I go downtown the other day for a meeting, and there’s two young girls crossing Broadway in front of me, they’re wearing dresses as long as one of my shirts. No stockings. No underwear, for all I know.” He didn’t say that one of the girls was Helen Malone, that he had leaned forward and peered through the windshield incredulously, that when a stray summer breeze had lifted the corner of her short Indian sack dress he had begun to feel very warm indeed and had looked down to see the fabric at his crotch straining visibly, until a car behind him had honked to let him know the light was green. It reminded him of the new bookkeeper in his office, the one with the bleached hair flipped up on her shoulders and the little-girl dresses with the collars and cuffs and the low waists, the one who always rubbed up against him when she passed behind his desk.
Sal reached beneath the bar and brought out the coffee pot. He poured a cup for himself, and a second cup for Tommy.
“You know my sister who’s in the convent? I don’t know what’s going on with her, either. She’s reading Jane Eyre. A nun! It’s a book my daughter read in school. I never read it—I had to read Moby Dick—so I asked my daughter what it’s about. Some woman is a governess and winds up marrying the man of the house. My sister the nun is reading this? The other day she went to buy a bathing suit. A bathing suit! My sister told me I was behind the times. Maybe that’s it. I’m behind the times. I’m still back in the good times.”
The two men stared at each other. “Jesus Christ,” Tommy whispered, as though he was witnessing a miracle, “that’s the voice of John Scanlan, coming right out of my mouth.”
“It always has, Tom,” Sal said with a smile. “You just never noticed it before. I think that’s what parents are for. You need to learn to talk. They give you the voice.” In the silence Tommy could hear the television, could hear some woman on one of the soaps say stridently, “Doctor, will I ever be a whole person again?”
“I don’t know, Tom,” Sal added, pouring himself another cup of coffee. “Nothing ever changes much around here. My mother died. I put the pinball by the door. I got a new TV. On St. Patrick’s Day I have corned beef and cabbage on the menu and put food coloring in the beer. Girls get knocked up, old men die. Excuse me, nothing personal. I don’t know about nuns. Your sister can’t stop being a nun, can she?”
“Who knows anymore?”
“No, forget it, I don’t think you can stop being a nun without a whole lot of rigamarole from the pope. But your father—I don’t know. It sounds like he’s pretty bad.”
Tommy looked into his coffee cup again. The sun was moving and he had to move his cup to make it change colors. He wanted to tell Sal that his father was not the trouble. In some strange way he liked talking like his father, thinking like his father. When he thought about running the company with Mark, all he could think of was reining his brother in, telling him to watch it with the crazy ideas. As he watched his father’s life ebb, day after day, he began to feel as if his father was flowing into him.
Now he sat on the attic floor and all he could think of was changes, how he hated them, how he wanted them to stop, how he sounded like the old man wasting away in his hospital bed. He looked at the wedding picture in his hand and wondered whether the people in that picture had intentionally left it in the dust, whether they had soured on their old dreams or simply had new ones. Tommy felt his own old dreams slipping away, but he was not sure what the new ones would be. He only knew that they would revolve around his wife. He walked to the edge of the ladder and looked down. He could see his wife in that dressing room, black and white and beautiful amid the roses, in her black bra and black half slip, fixing her hair in front of a mirror that would hang on the one