This house felt too grand for him, like the house of an adult, not the house of an overgrown boy, but he knew she would seem at home here, small and elegant in the large, well-proportioned rooms. He remembered leaving Sal’s the other day, driving aimlessly, his eyes clouded by tears, through the Bronx to Westchester, where he was to see about giving an estimate for the foundation for a new wing of the high school. As he turned into the entrance, a sedan had almost sideswiped him, driving too close to the center of the road, and he had yelled “Jesus Christ” and raised his middle finger to the driver before he saw that it was Connie, hunched over the wheel, her lower lip tight between her teeth, with that Martinelli guy in the seat beside her. He had pulled the car over in the parking lot, next to some sawhorses, and rested his head on the wheel until the sick feeling in his stomach had passed.
For hours after that he had driven around, listening to Sinatra on the radio. The day had faded quietly into night, the way it did on these hot August days, and the back of his shirt was drenched with perspiration, but still he drove around, until finally he took a right-hand turn and found himself in the parking lot of the hospital.
“Good evening, Mr. Scanlan,” the youngest of the nurses said when he approached his father’s room. Dorothy O’Haire was sitting in a plastic chair outside, working on some dun-colored piece of knitting. Seeing her there, Tommy assumed that his father was up and around, raising hell, but when he sat down by the bed he could tell that the old man was in a deep sleep; his eyes were still beneath the blue-veined lids, and his breathing seemed to stop between each inhalation, so that Tommy thought each breath was the last. On the bedside table there was an envelope with “Ryan house” written on it in the old man’s florid handwriting, the pride of the nuns at St. Aloysius School; it had been there for weeks, and for the first time Tommy picked it up. As though the gesture had reached deep inside his failing consciousness, John Scanlan’s eyes opened slowly, and he stared at his son.
“Something important,” he said dully.
“I know,” Tommy said.
“You do it for your mother,” the old man said, breathing hard on each word.
“Yes.”
“Move.”
“We’ll talk about it when you’re a little bit better, Pop,” Tommy said, holding the envelope.
John Scanlan shook his head and fell deeper into the pillows.
“No,” he said. And then his eyes closed and the slow, measured cadence of his breathing began again.
Tommy had ripped open the envelope and slid the key, shiny as a new penny, into his palm. The one his father had tossed into Connie’s lap, that Sunday that now seemed so long ago, had lain on their dresser, untouched, all this time. The freshly cut end of this other one had left a scratch just below Tommy’s thumb. He had put it into his pocket, among the small change, and had left it there until this afternoon, when he used it to unlock the door.
Now, coming downstairs, the manila envelope from the trunk under his arm, he took the key from the mantel in the living room and held it again in his palm. Then he took out his key ring and slid it next to the keys to the car, the keys to his house in Kenwood, and the keys to his office. He expected to hear those tiny feet again, but there was only silence, and then the echo of his footsteps as he let himself out and locked the door behind him.
17
THE BRIDAL SALON WAS NOT EXACTLY what Maggie had expected. She had never really thought about getting married, although they had all discussed it enough at school. “If you could marry Paul or John, or any of the boys in class, which would it be?” JoAnne Jessup would suddenly ask her and Debbie at lunch. But that was just fooling around, and actually being married was not, at least as far as Maggie could see. Actually being married seemed so crowded with unspoken rules and odd secrets and unfathomable responsibilities that it had no more occurred to her to imagine being married herself than it had to imagine driving a motorcycle or having a job. She had, however, thought about being a bride, which had more