she realized she had been waiting for a visitor, waiting for the visit that would ruin her life.
She had gotten into Tommy’s car, then; he had left it in the driveway while he went off with one of the cement-truck drivers, but somehow she saw the fact that it was there as an omen, a sign, and an opportunity to save herself. She did not know why she was here, at the hospital, except that in some odd way she equated her fall from grace with John Scanlan. Just for a moment, on the way there, she had wondered if her father-in-law had planned this, had somehow arranged for Joey Martinelli to be the foreman at the project for this very reason. “I’m off my trolley,” she muttered to herself in the quiet of the car.
She found a space all the way at the back of the lot, where there were no other cars, and pulled in, straddling one of the painted white dividing lines. She walked toward the building, its big brick smokestack sending a plume of gray-black up toward the sky. In her straw bag was the Daily News, and an airline bottle of Four Roses she had found in the back of the liquor cabinet.
Her heart was throbbing so violently as she crossed the parking lot that she wondered if, beneath her blouse, it looked like a painting of the Sacred Heart, a red oval, fiery like a bull’s-eye on her body. All night she had rehearsed what she would say, how she would try to persuade John Scanlan to give up the idea of moving them into that new house, how she would try to talk him out of forcing Tommy into Scanlan & Co. Tommy hadn’t told her a thing, but she had known what was happening when she saw the new key on his key ring, and heard from Joey that the word was out that the old man was selling First Concrete. She had thought at first that she would try to talk to Tommy, but then she had realized that it was useless to discuss the matter with anyone but John Scanlan himself. When she recognized this, she knew some part of her life was over, that she had grown up, and that it was not the liberation she had always thought it would be, but an acceptance of her own powerlessness.
She was relieved, at the visitor’s desk, to find that no one else had a pass to be in John Scanlan’s room. No one would demand an explanation of why she was stopping by for the first time in her father-in-law’s month-long illness, and how she had arrived at the hospital. Standing in the doorway of the room, listening to John Scanlan snore hoarsely, she knew that her carefully rehearsed speech had been a waste of time. Looking across at his beaky profile, the hair slipping over his high forehead, she felt a frisson of fear and dislike, but she knew that he would never again be the power that ruled all their lives. His chest was too sunken, his breathing too tenuous. With a kind of sympathy she looked at the tubes running to and from the bed and realized that he was catheterized, and thought what a humiliating thing that was for a man.
When she stepped to the side of the bed she saw that someone else was there, too, asleep in a chair. It was John’s secretary, Dorothy. Connie had only met her once, at a horrid party for John’s sixtieth birthday, but she recognized her because something about her stolid face and figure had reminded Connie of her aunt Rose. Tommy had told her that Dorothy was helping out, although the table her father-in-law had been using as a desk was empty now except for a stack of blank Scanlan & Co. stationery.
“Dorothy,” Connie whispered, touching her arm lightly.
The other woman slowly raised her head and looked at the bed, then up at Connie. Half asleep, she stared, and then her eyes widened with panic.
“It’s okay,” Connie said. “You must have fallen asleep. It’s kind of stuffy in here.”
“We were working,” said Dorothy, her fingers, with their big knuckles, twisting round one another like a tangled ball of yarn.
Connie looked down at John Scanlan. It was clear that he was barely capable of consciousness, much less work. She tried to search Dorothy’s face for some sign of guilt or fear, but the woman was staring at her